OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Mathematical Foundations for Social Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Social computing encompasses the mechanisms through which people interact with computational systems: crowdsourcing systems, ranking and recommendation systems, online prediction markets, citizen science projects, and collaboratively edited wikis, to name a few. These systems share the common feature that humans are active participants, making choices that determine the input to, and therefore the output of, the system. The output of these systems can be viewed as a joint computation between machine and human, and can be richer than what either could produce alone. The term social computing is often used as a synonym for several related areas, such as "human computation" and subsets of "collective intelligence"; we use it in its broadest sense to encompass all of these things. Social computing is blossoming into a rich research area of its own, with contributions from diverse disciplines including computer science, economics, and other social sciences. Yet a broad mathematical foundation for social computing is yet to be established, with a plethora of under-explored opportunities for mathematical research to impact social computing. As in other fields, there is great potential for mathematical work to influence and shape the future of social computing. However, we are far from having the systematic and principled understanding of the advantages, limitations, and potentials of social computing required to match the impact on applications that has occurred in other fields. In June 2015, we brought together roughly 25 experts in related fields to discuss the promise and challenges of establishing mathematical foundations for social computing. This document captures several of the key ideas discussed.
Computer-Aided Personalized Education
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

The shortage of people trained in STEM fields is becoming acute, and universities and colleges are straining to satisfy this demand. In the case of computer science, for instance, the number of US students taking introductory courses has grown three-fold in the past decade. Recently, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been promoted as a way to ease this strain. This at best provides access to education. The bigger challenge though is coping with heterogeneous backgrounds of different students, retention, providing feedback, and assessment. Personalized education relying on computational tools can address this challenge. While automated tutoring has been studied at different times in different communities, recent advances in computing and education technology offer exciting opportunities to transform the manner in which students learn. In particular, at least three trends are significant. First, progress in logical reasoning, data analytics, and natural language processing has led to tutoring tools for automatic assessment, personalized instruction including targeted feedback, and adaptive content generation for a variety of subjects. Second, research in the science of learning and human-computer interaction is leading to a better understanding of how different students learn, when and what types of interventions are effective for different instructional goals, and how to measure the success of educational tools. Finally, the recent emergence of online education platforms, both in academia and industry, is leading to new opportunities for the development of a shared infrastructure. This CCC workshop brought together researchers developing educational tools based on technologies such as logical reasoning and machine learning with researchers in education, human-computer interaction, and cognitive psychology.
Acoustic Scene Classification with Spectrogram Processing Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2020
Year: 2020

Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in acoustic scene classification (ASC) task. The audio data is often transformed into two-dimensional spectrogram representations, which are then fed to the neural networks. In this paper, we study the problem of efficiently taking advantage of different spectrogram representations through discriminative processing strategies. There are two main contributions. The first contribution is exploring the impact of the combination of multiple spectrogram representations at different stages, which provides a meaningful reference for the effective spectrogram fusion. The second contribution is that the processing strategies in multiple frequency bands and multiple temporal frames are proposed to make fully use of a single spectrogram representation. The proposed spectrogram processing strategies can be easily transferred to any network structures. The experiments are carried out on the DCASE 2020 Task1 datasets, and the results show that our method could achieve the accuracy of 81.8% (official baseline: 54.1%) and 92.1% (official baseline: 87.3%) on the officially provided fold 1 evaluation dataset of Task1A and Task1B, respectively.
Artificial Life in Game Mods for Intuitive Evolution Education
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

The understanding and acceptance of evolution by natural selection has become a difficult issue in many parts of the world, particularly the United States of America. The use of games to improve intuition about evolution via natural selection is promising but can be challenging. We propose the use of modifications to commercial games using artificial life techniques to 'stealth teach' about evolution via natural selection, provide a proof-of-concept mod of the game Stardew Valley, and report on its initial reception.
Fast Training of Deep Neural Networks Robust to Adversarial Perturbations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Deep neural networks are capable of training fast and generalizing well within many domains. Despite their promising performance, deep networks have shown sensitivities to perturbations of their inputs (e.g., adversarial examples) and their learned feature representations are often difficult to interpret, raising concerns about their true capability and trustworthiness. Recent work in adversarial training, a form of robust optimization in which the model is optimized against adversarial examples, demonstrates the ability to improve performance sensitivities to perturbations and yield feature representations that are more interpretable. Adversarial training, however, comes with an increased computational cost over that of standard (i.e., nonrobust) training, rendering it impractical for use in large-scale problems. Recent work suggests that a fast approximation to adversarial training shows promise for reducing training time and maintaining robustness in the presence of perturbations bounded by the infinity norm. In this work, we demonstrate that this approach extends to the Euclidean norm and preserves the human-aligned feature representations that are common for robust models. Additionally, we show that using a distributed training scheme can further reduce the time to train robust deep networks. Fast adversarial training is a promising approach that will provide increased security and explainability in machine learning applications for which robust optimization was previously thought to be impractical.
Consistency Regularization with Generative Adversarial Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) based semi-supervised learning (SSL) approaches are shown to improve classification performance by utilizing a large number of unlabeled samples in conjunction with limited labeled samples. However, their performance still lags behind the state-of-the-art non-GAN based SSL approaches. We identify that the main reason for this is the lack of consistency in class probability predictions on the same image under local perturbations. Following the general literature, we address this issue via label consistency regularization, which enforces the class probability predictions for an input image to be unchanged under various semantic-preserving perturbations. In this work, we introduce consistency regularization into the vanilla semi-GAN to address this critical limitation. In particular, we present a new composite consistency regularization method which, in spirit, leverages both local consistency and interpolation consistency. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on two SSL image classification benchmark datasets, SVHN and CIFAR-10. Our experiments show that this new composite consistency regularization based semi-GAN significantly improves its performance and achieves new state-of-the-art performance among GAN-based SSL approaches.
Audio-Visual Understanding of Passenger Intents for In-Cabin Conversational Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Building multimodal dialogue understanding capabilities situated in the in-cabin context is crucial to enhance passenger comfort in autonomous vehicle (AV) interaction systems. To this end, understanding passenger intents from spoken interactions and vehicle vision systems is a crucial component for developing contextual and visually grounded conversational agents for AV. Towards this goal, we explore AMIE (Automated-vehicle Multimodal In-cabin Experience), the in-cabin agent responsible for handling multimodal passenger-vehicle interactions. In this work, we discuss the benefits of a multimodal understanding of in-cabin utterances by incorporating verbal/language input together with the non-verbal/acoustic and visual clues from inside and outside the vehicle. Our experimental results outperformed text-only baselines as we achieved improved performances for intent detection with a multimodal approach.
Graph Neural Networks-based Clustering for Social Internet of Things
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we propose a machine learning process for clustering large-scale social Internet-of-things (SIoT) devices into several groups of related devices sharing strong relations. To this end, we generate undirected weighted graphs based on the historical dataset of IoT devices and their social relations. Using the adjacency matrices of these graphs and the IoT devices' features, we embed the graphs' nodes using a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to obtain numerical vector representations of the IoT devices. The vector representation does not only reflect the characteristics of the device but also its relations with its peers. The obtained node embeddings are then fed to a conventional unsupervised learning algorithm to determine the clusters accordingly. We showcase the obtained IoT groups using two well-known clustering algorithms, specifically the K-means and the density-based algorithm for discovering clusters (DBSCAN). Finally, we compare the performances of the proposed GNN-based clustering approach in terms of coverage and modularity to those of the deterministic Louvain community detection algorithm applied solely on the graphs created from the different relations. It is shown that the framework achieves promising preliminary results in clustering large-scale IoT systems.
BISM: Bytecode-Level Instrumentation for Software Monitoring
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2020
Year: 2020

BISM (Bytecode-Level Instrumentation for Software Monitoring) is a lightweight bytecode instrumentation tool that features an expressive high-level control-flow-aware instrumentation language. The language follows the aspect-oriented programming paradigm by adopting the joinpoint model, advice inlining, and separate instrumentation mechanisms. BISM provides joinpoints ranging from bytecode instruction to method execution, access to comprehensive static and dynamic context information, and instrumentation methods. BISM runs in two instrumentation modes: build-time and load-time. We demonstrate BISM effectiveness using two experiments: a security scenario and a general runtime verification case. The results show that BISM instrumentation incurs low runtime and memory overheads.
A Technique for Obtaining True Approximations for $k$-Center with Covering Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

There has been a recent surge of interest in incorporating fairness aspects into classical clustering problems. Two recently introduced variants of the $k$-Center problem in this spirit are Colorful $k$-Center, introduced by Bandyapadhyay, Inamdar, Pai, and Varadarajan, and lottery models, such as the Fair Robust $k$-Center problem introduced by Harris, Pensyl, Srinivasan, and Trinh. To address fairness aspects, these models, compared to traditional $k$-Center, include additional covering constraints. Prior approximation results for these models require to relax some of the normally hard constraints, like the number of centers to be opened or the involved covering constraints, and therefore, only obtain constant-factor pseudo-approximations. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to deal with such covering constraints that leads to (true) approximations, including a $4$-approximation for Colorful $k$-Center with constantly many colors---settling an open question raised by Bandyapadhyay, Inamdar, Pai, and Varadarajan---and a $4$-approximation for Fair Robust $k$-Center, for which the existence of a (true) constant-factor approximation was also open. We complement our results by showing that if one allows an unbounded number of colors, then Colorful $k$-Center admits no approximation algorithm with finite approximation guarantee, assuming that $\mathrm{P} \neq \mathrm{NP}$. Moreover, under the Exponential Time Hypothesis, the problem is inapproximable if the number of colors grows faster than logarithmic in the size of the ground set.
A Quantum Finite Automata Approach to Modeling the Chemical Reactions
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2020
Year: 2020

In recent years, the modeling interest has increased significantly from the molecular level to the atomic and quantum scale. The field of computational chemistry plays a significant role in designing computational models for the operation and simulation of systems ranging from atoms and molecules to industrial-scale processes. It is influenced by a tremendous increase in computing power and the efficiency of algorithms. The representation of chemical reactions using classical automata theory in thermodynamic terms had a great influence on computer science. The study of chemical information processing with quantum computational models is a natural goal. In this paper, we have modeled chemical reactions using two-way quantum finite automata, which are halted in linear time. Additionally, classical pushdown automata can be designed for such chemical reactions with multiple stacks. It has been proven that computational versatility can be increased by combining chemical accept/reject signatures and quantum automata models.
Incorporating prior knowledge about structural constraints in model identification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Model identification is a crucial problem in chemical industries. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in learning data-driven models utilizing partial knowledge about the system of interest. Most techniques for model identification do not provide the freedom to incorporate any partial information such as the structure of the model. In this article, we propose model identification techniques that could leverage such partial information to produce better estimates. Specifically, we propose Structural Principal Component Analysis (SPCA) which improvises over existing methods like PCA by utilizing the essential structural information about the model. Most of the existing methods or closely related methods use sparsity constraints which could be computationally expensive. Our proposed method is a wise modification of PCA to utilize structural information. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated using synthetic and industrial case-studies.
Social media self-branding and success: Quantitative evidence from a model competition
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

Thanks to the availability of large online data sets, it has become possible to quantify success in different fields of human endeavour. The study presented here contributes to this literature in evaluating the effect of social media activity, as a means of 'self-branding', to increase the chances of models being elected for the Playboy Magazine's Playmate of the Year award. We hypothesise that candidates who actively manage their Instagram accounts can increase their likelihood to win the award: they use social media to gain more followers, who then might vote for them in the award polls. The findings indicate that social media activity actually has predictive capacity to estimate the outcome of the award. We find evidence that candidates who manage their social media accounts more actively than other candidates have a higher probability to become Playmate of the Year. The findings underline the benefits of social media
Agile Approach for IT Forensics Management
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

The forensic investigation of cyber attacks and IT incidents is becoming increasingly difficult due to increasing complexity and intensify networking. Especially with Advanced Attacks (AT) like the increasing Advanced Persistent Threats an agile approach is indispensable. Several systems are involved in an attack (multi-host attacks). Current forensic models and procedures show considerable deficits in the process of analyzing such attacks. For this purpose, this paper presents the novel flower model, which uses agile methods and forms a new forensic management approach. In this way, the growing challenges of ATs are met. In the forensic investigation of such attacks, big data problems have to be solved due to the amount of data that needs to be analyzed. The proposed model meets this requirement by precisely defining the questions that need to be answered in an early state and collecting only the evidence usable in court proceedings that is needed to answer these questions. Additionally, the novel flower model for AT is presented that meets the different phases of an investigation process.
Automatic Detection of Sexist Statements Commonly Used at the Workplace
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Detecting hate speech in the workplace is a unique classification task, as the underlying social context implies a subtler version of conventional hate speech. Applications regarding a state-of the-art workplace sexism detection model include aids for Human Resources departments, AI chatbots and sentiment analysis. Most existing hate speech detection methods, although robust and accurate, focus on hate speech found on social media, specifically Twitter. The context of social media is much more anonymous than the workplace, therefore it tends to lend itself to more aggressive and "hostile" versions of sexism. Therefore, datasets with large amounts of "hostile" sexism have a slightly easier detection task since "hostile" sexist statements can hinge on a couple words that, regardless of context, tip the model off that a statement is sexist. In this paper we present a dataset of sexist statements that are more likely to be said in the workplace as well as a deep learning model that can achieve state-of-the art results. Previous research has created state-of-the-art models to distinguish "hostile" and "benevolent" sexism based simply on aggregated Twitter data. Our deep learning methods, initialized with GloVe or random word embeddings, use LSTMs with attention mechanisms to outperform those models on a more diverse, filtered dataset that is more targeted towards workplace sexism, leading to an F1 score of 0.88.
Agent-Based Modelling: An Overview with Application to Disease Dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2020
Year: 2020

Modelling and computational methods have been essential in advancing quantitative science, especially in the past two decades with the availability of vast amount of complex, voluminous, and heterogeneous data. In particular, there has been a surge of interest in agent-based modelling, largely due to its capabilities to exploit such data and make significant projections. However, any well-established quantitative method relies on theoretical frameworks for both construction and analysis. While the computational aspects of agent-based modelling have been detailed in existing literature, the underlying theoretical basis has rarely been used in its construction. In this exposition, we provide an overview of the theoretical foundation of agent-based modelling and establish a relationship with its computational implementation. In addition to detailing the main characteristics of this computational methodology, we illustrate its application to simulating the spread of an infectious disease in a simple, dynamical process. As the use of agent-based models expands to various disciplines, our review highlights the need for directed research efforts to develop theoretical methods and analytical tools for the analysis of such models.
Analysis of Predictive Coding Models for Phonemic Representation Learning in Small Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Neural network models using predictive coding are interesting from the viewpoint of computational modelling of human language acquisition, where the objective is to understand how linguistic units could be learned from speech without any labels. Even though several promising predictive coding -based learning algorithms have been proposed in the literature, it is currently unclear how well they generalise to different languages and training dataset sizes. In addition, despite that such models have shown to be effective phonemic feature learners, it is unclear whether minimisation of the predictive loss functions of these models also leads to optimal phoneme-like representations. The present study investigates the behaviour of two predictive coding models, Autoregressive Predictive Coding and Contrastive Predictive Coding, in a phoneme discrimination task (ABX task) for two languages with different dataset sizes. Our experiments show a strong correlation between the autoregressive loss and the phoneme discrimination scores with the two datasets. However, to our surprise, the CPC model shows rapid convergence already after one pass over the training data, and, on average, its representations outperform those of APC on both languages.
Dung's semantics satisfy attack removal monotonicity
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

We show that preferred, stable, complete, and grounded semantics satisfy attack removal monotonicity. This means that if an attack from b to a is removed, the status of a cannot worsen, e.g. if a was skeptically accepted, it cannot become rejected.
Predicting the Accuracy of a Few-Shot Classifier
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In the context of few-shot learning, one cannot measure the generalization ability of a trained classifier using validation sets, due to the small number of labeled samples. In this paper, we are interested in finding alternatives to answer the question: is my classifier generalizing well to previously unseen data? We first analyze the reasons for the variability of generalization performances. We then investigate the case of using transfer-based solutions, and consider three settings: i) supervised where we only have access to a few labeled samples, ii) semi-supervised where we have access to both a few labeled samples and a set of unlabeled samples and iii) unsupervised where we only have access to unlabeled samples. For each setting, we propose reasonable measures that we empirically demonstrate to be correlated with the generalization ability of considered classifiers. We also show that these simple measures can be used to predict generalization up to a certain confidence. We conduct our experiments on standard few-shot vision datasets.